Opera News names Herschel Garfein‘s Mortality Mansions: Songs of Love and Loss After 60 an October 2018 Critic’s Choice! Garfein handpicked eleven poems from the large output of Donald Hall, the 2006 poet laureate who died in June at eighty-nine, creating—as Hall puts it in the notes—a cycle that has ‘a wholeness I could never…
The National Association of Teachers of Singing‘s November/December issue of The Journal of Singing features a rave new review for Herschel Garfein’s Mortality Mansions: Songs of Love and Loss after 60 recording: “Herschel Garfein’s song cycle Mortality Mansions … serves as a stirring final testament to Donald Hall’s work and to the almost limitless possibilities…
Albany Times Union‘s Joseph Dalton reviews Herschel Garfein’s new Mortality Mansions recording in his “Classical Notes” column: “The American poet Donald Hall, dubbed by the New York Times as the ‘laureate of rural life,’ died on June 23 at age 89. That very same week, Delos released ‘Mortality Mansions,’ a unique collection of songs based…
Joshua Kosman has a newly published review for Herschel Garfein’s Mortality Mansions: Songs of Love and Loss After 60 in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The emotional impact of ‘Mortality Mansions,’ weighty to begin with, grew even more poignant with the death of the 89-year-old poet Donald Hall at the end of June. In this shimmering,…
Some of you are no doubt already aware that Donald Hall—the former U.S. Poet Laureate whose verses were masterfully set by two-time GRAMMY® Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein—passed away on Saturday, June 23. Readers of this blog know that the resulting song cycle, Mortality Mansions (DE 3548), was released on Delos just this month. We’d like…
In this unique Delos album, two-time Grammy Award-winning composer, librettist, and producer Herschel Garfein introduces Mortality Mansions: a stunning new song cycle setting poems by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. Hall’s plain-spoken, yet profound poetry reveals his candid perspectives on aging, with its inevitable physical decline, fears, personal losses, and emotional trials. Yet he…
Mortality Mansions: Songs of Love and Loss after 60 In this unique Delos album, two-time Grammy Award-winning composer, librettist, and producer Herschel Garfein introduces Mortality Mansions: a stunning new song cycle setting poems by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. Hall’s plain-spoken, yet profound poetry reveals his candid perspectives on aging, with its inevitable physical…
As a capstone to Mortality Mansions, the music on this album concludes with a setting by Garfein of a poem by Jane Kenyon, sung by the soprano Marnie Breckenridge, with Dimitri Dover on piano. The poem, “Otherwise,” is one of Kenyon’s best-known and most moving: a paean to the precious quotidian pleasures of life while…
The Heyman Center for the Humanities presents the full, live video presentation of the world premiere performance of Mortality Mansions, a collaboration of U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall and GRAMMY® Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein: Mortality Mansions: Songs of Love and Loss after 60 In this unique Delos album, two-time Grammy Award-winning composer, librettist, and producer…
With the second piece of Mortality Mansions, “When I Was Young”, the song cycle shifts into the present tense and dives into the themes of ardor and eros, commitment and loss, in its aging characters. “When I was young and sexual/I looked forward to a cool Olympian age/for release from my obsessions,” Slattery sings with the…
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